Edited by Ad Putter
and Myra Stokes

THE WORKS OF THE GAWAIN POET

Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

PENGUIN CLASSICS

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First published in Great Britain by Penguin Classics 2014

Editorial material copyright © Ad Putter and Myra Stokes, 2014

Cover: Illustration to Cleanness, c.1400, from the Pearl manuscript (Cotton Nero A X) in the British Library (© The British Library Board. Cotton Nero A X Art 3 f56)

All rights reserved

The moral right of the editors has been asserted

Typeset by Dinah Drazin

ISBN: 978-0-141-39526-5

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

The Poems and the Poet

Dialect and Inflections

The Alliterative Metre

Editorial Practice

Acknowledgements

THE WORKS OF THE GAWAIN POET

Pearl

Cleanness

Patience

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Notes to Pearl

Notes to Cleanness

Notes to Patience

Notes to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Bibliography of Works Cited

Editorial Emendations

Glossary

List of Names

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PENGUIN CLASSICS

THE WORKS OF THE GAWAIN POET

AD PUTTER teaches at the English Department and the Centre for Medieval Studies of the University of Bristol, where he is Professor of Medieval English Literature. He has written extensively on English, European and Latin texts of the Middle Ages, and on metre. His monographs include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (1996) and An Introduction to the Gawain Poet (1997). He has also edited, with Elizabeth Archibald, The Cambridge Companion to the Arthurian Legend (2009).

MYRA STOKES was formerly Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Bristol University, and is now retired. Her chief interests are in medieval vernacular languages, literatures and metres. She is the author of Justice and Mercy in Piers Plowman (1984) and The Language of Jane Austen (1991), and has also written on Chaucer, the Gawain poet, Arthurian literature and the metre of alliterative verse.

Abbreviations

For a list of abbreviations of grammatical terms, please see the Glossary (pp. 801–2).